For more than forty years, as part of an alliance with the United States, Japan was allowed access to some of the very best fighters in the world. A string of American fighters, starting with the F-86 Sabre, then the F-104 Starfighter, F-4 Phantom and finally the F-15 provided the...

Co-author: Misato Matsuoka* There is a lot of buzz about U.S. rebalancing policy, but at the end of the day it is not a massive policy change from the U.S. perspective and neither is it one from the perspective of U.S. allies and partners, old and emerging ones, in the region. The increase of a...

by ROBERTO TOFANI Will President Obama invite his Vietnamese counterpart, Truong Tan Sang, to sample a Big Mac American-style during his visit to the United States? This past week the mainstream media have been overwhelmed by news of the forthcoming McDonald’s opening in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon. This development should not have...

In an article in The Diplomat, Robert Kelly raised an interesting question regarding whether the youth protests that have engulfed Turkey, Brazil, Egypt will spread to Asia. He argued that all of them have a common denominator with other Asian countries, where there are: [W]ell-educated youth, exposed through modern technologies to the reality of better, cleaner governance elsewhere. And...

Below is a guest contribution by Brad Nelson from CWCP. A few days ago political scientist and Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer made an astute point on Twitter: “Hillary/Donilon/Geither to Kerry/Rice/Lew. Lots, lots less Asia focus in 2nd term Obama team. Let’s hope Xi Jinping doesn’t notice.” I think Bremmer’s assessment is spot on. Practically all of the...

by ROBERTO TOFANI Vietnamese Prime Minister, Nguyen Tan Dung, will deliver the keynote address at the 12th IISS Asia Security Summit(1), also called the Shangri-La Dialogue, which will convene in Singapore from 31 May to Jun 2. The meeting is “a Track One security summit which brings together defense ministers, armed forces’ commanders, and the...

In my previous post, I examined the general nature of the current dispute between the Philippines and Taiwan and the foreign policy motivations on the Taiwan side. Yet, the behaviour of Taiwan’s government in the aftermath of the incident from May 9 that resulted in death of a Taiwanese fisherman after his boat was fired upon...

A short time ago, I praised Taiwan for reaching an agreement with Japan on fishing in the area around Diaoyutai/Senkaku islands. It was a rare occasion on which two sides reached consensus on a highly disputed issue involving sovereignty claims and resource sharing. However, the seas of East and Southeast Asia offer plenty of opportunities to get...

by ROBERTO TOFANI [Part 1 here] Discussions and debates during the one-day workshop – ‘Sovereignty over Paracel and Spratly Archipelagos: Historical and Legal Aspects’ – held in the Quang Ngai province at the end of April and organized by the Pham Van Dong University focused mostly on two topics related to the South China Sea issue: historical...

by ROBERTO TOFANI Quang Ngai – “In South China Sea—East Sea as referred by the Vietnamese–China is unable to present historical evidence of its claim. Its territory was historically limited to Hainan island, thus Chinese used force to illegally occupy rocks, features and islands in the Paracel and Spratly archipelagos”. With these remarks, Prof. Pham Dang...

by SOJUNG PARK South Korea pulled out its last remaining workers from the Kaesong Industrial Complex on May 3, putting the only existing symbol of inter-Korean cooperation in jeopardy. To diffuse tensions, some have called on Seoul to send a diplomatic envoy to North Korea, but others have proposed the restoration of the United States’...